ecoculture, geophilosophy, mediapolitics

Here’s the “reader’s guide” I promised for Shadowing the Anthropocene. It begins with a quick summary of the book’s main contribution — a kind of “master key” to what it tries to do. It then lays out a set of paths one can take through the book, which would be useful for readers with an interest in one or two but not all of the book’s themes. Finally, I include the detailed table of contents (without pagination), as this somehow got dropped during the editing process, even while a detailed index and bibliography got added.

Shadowing the Anthropocene: Eco-Realism for Turbulent Times arrived in the mail today. It’s published by punctum books, an open-access academic and para-academic publisher I’ve found to be a real delight to work with. Eileen Joy deserves a medal for her leadership of punctum, and Vincent W.J. van Gerven Oei’s cover and book design is beautiful. The book can be purchased in print for $22 from the publisher’s web site (it honestly feels very nice to hold in your hands), or you can “pay what you can” ($5 minimum) for a PDF.

Since the book presents some challenging reading to the non-philosophically inclined, I will be posting a “reader’s guide” soon.

An off-the-cuff essay, written not for any particular occasion, but just to get it out of me. It’s probably mostly common knowledge (among people on the green left), just maybe not well articulated yet, and too easily forgotten. Politically, we’re all playing a little catch-up these days.

Understanding the apparent global turn we are seeing against liberal democracy, or against “liberal globalism,” is important if we are to make inroads toward a “greener” future.

The electoral successes — and in some case repeated successes — of “illiberal” leaders like Donald Trump, Turkish president Erdogan, Hungary’s Victor Orbán, the Philippines’ Rodrigo Duterte, Poland’s Law and Justice (PiS) party, India’s BJP (to some extent), the strange coalition of the unpeggable (but populist) Five Star Movement and the far-right Lega in Italy, the British vote in favor of Brexit, and the ongoing hegemonies of Vladimir Putin in Russia and of the Communist Party under Xi Jinping in China — all of these mark a seeming global political swing toward authoritarian conservatism, right-wing populism, anti-liberalism, or something of the sort.

Geology watchers were more than a little surprised last month to learn that we are living in a new age called the Meghalayan, which apparently began about 4200 years ago.

After all the excitement over the Anthropocene, it seems that a rival group of geological stratigraphers — one tasked with naming the sub-parts of the Holocene — has won the naming race, for the time being. Some, like Mark Maslin and Simon Lewis, are not happy with the outcome, which triviliazes the whole point of the Anthropocene debate — to gauge the degree to which humans are and should recognize our collective centrality in geological-scale global change. Geologist Ben van der Pluijm calls this trivialization Monty Pythonesque — a slicing up of the Holocene by “the Ministry of Silly Cuts.” Continue Reading »

Immanence sometimes dips into areas of controversial or “boundary” science, which means areas of science whose interpretation is both publicly and scientifically contentious. While I don’t consider climate science to be all that scientifically controversial (though it is certainly politically controversial), and the general topics of “fake news,” “information war,” and the alternative media ecosystem (which are sometimes covered here) are not particularly scientifically contentious, topics such as “the Hum,” to take one example, fall into the area of anomalous phenomena — phenomena whose ontological status is considered unknown, mysterious, or problematic from a scientific perspective. (See note 1 below on the Hum.)

Public health has seen a number of such contentious issues arise, and in recent years the growth in cases of Lyme disease, and more so of “chronic Lyme,” has joined the ranks of other syndromes and conditions — from Chronic Fatigue Syndrome, Fibromyalgia, and Multiple Chemical Sensitivity to Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder (or specific variants of it, such as Gulf War Syndrome), Recovered Memory Syndrome, Multiple Personality Disorder, and others — which have at various times teetered precipitously at, or over, the edges of what the scientific community considers “real.” There are connections between many of these phenomena and environmental change (on that, see Mary Beth Pfeiffer’s book), but those won’t be the primary focus of this post. Continue Reading »

Immanence passed its tenth anniversary last month and somehow failed to celebrate it. (The actual anniversary, May 11, marks the posting of this two-line fragment. Regular posts took another seven months to appear, or at least to take on a permanent form.)

To celebrate, I recently re-did the Primer page, which collects some of the more interesting theoretical/analytical posts across several themes — “Eco-theory and climate politics,” “Post-constructivism and Speculative Realism,” “Process-relational theory,” “Cinema and media theory,” “The body politic (politics, affect, culture),” “Interdisciplinarity, scholarly publishing, and academic life,” “the ‘Anthropocene’ naming debate,” and “Readings” (i.e., book discussions). I also added to the “Faves” page. Continue Reading »

rather like a beating heart, the Earth changes shape systematically and repeatedly with each ‘Earthbeat’ taking 12 months. During the course of a single ‘beat,’ the northern hemisphere contracts, reaching a peak in February and March, at the same time as the southern hemisphere expands. This is followed by Continue Reading »

A Symposium and Convergence in Burlington, Vermont, October 20-22, 2018

Fifty years after the widespread international protests of 1968 challenged institutional norms, and some sixty years after C. P. Snow lamented the gap between academia’s “two cultures,” those of the arts and the sciences, it is time to ask whether educational institutions have changed in ways that help us address the world’s intensifying crises. Continue Reading »

A post-Commencement pep talk for myself (& academic friends who care to listen)

It should be pretty obvious by now that predatory, extractive capitalism is not working, and that we need to move swiftly to a regenerative mixed economy grounded in a respect for living systems.

The implications of that are pretty simple, but also profound.

For instance, that transition will require phasing out all of the millions of jobs — predatory jobs, bullshit jobs — that are premised on squeezing a profit at the expense of people, communities, and living systems. And it will require a simultaneous phasing in of all the work that it takes to make our communities socially and ecologically sustainable — healthy, happy, just, flourishing, eudaimonic, and ecologically diverse and resilient. Continue Reading »

Okay, so I watched Harry and Meghan’s royal wedding (not so much intentionally as to enjoy the loving company of my co-habitants) and was impressed by the tension between Bishop Michael Curry’s sermonizing on love and the dour and perplexed faces of many of the royal-loving Brits in the audience. Diana Evans’ Guardian piece gets at that tension very nicely.

I also caught the references in Curry’s speech to Jesuit paleontologist and theologian Teilhard de Chardin, whose work has been creeping into mainstream Catholic views about humanity and ecology, and whose views undergird — with significant critical rethinking — the views of ecotheologian Thomas Berry. (Berry should be familiar to most readers of Immanence: see, e.g., here, here, and here. In fact, his term “Ecozoic” figures in the tag line to my EcoCulture Lab — oh, and by the way, welcome, readers, to the EcoCulture Lab.)

Now, in a stunning article on Religion Dispatches, Notre Dame theology and history of science graduate John Slattery claims that Teilhard was not only forward-thinking in his embrace of evolutionary theory, but was also disappointingly retrograde in his embrace of eugenics and blatant racism. Continue Reading »